I am going to do a reinstall of Ubuntu on my Laptop this holiday. I have an ASUS UL30VT, with no flash drive, and i just wondered. I never use my card-reader for anything, but i have a 32GB SD-card that i do not use really. I was then wondering if installing Ubuntu on that SD-card will improve my performance much? Would it be like SSD

4 Answers
4

By experience, I can tell you that running Ubuntu on a SD card is usually unbearably slow. You won't get anywhere near SSD-like performance. This is due to the read and write speed limitations of SD cards and card readers.

Installing on a USB flash drive would give you at least equal, and most likely significantly better, performance.

But, then, the read/write limitation of a typical laptop card reader may be a further limitation. Typically, SD card readers are on the USB2 bus, so we're talking a speed of less than 30 MB/sec.
–
K7AAYNov 19 '13 at 0:20

Even using a class 10 sd card, the sequential speed would be ~10MB/s writting and ~20MB/s reading. That's not much compared to the 50+MB/s writting and 200+MB/s reading provided by entry level ssd disks.